Today my therapist tells me I might try combing my hair every night before bed, so that I’m not too tangled to wake up. It’s the funniest he’s ever been.
I see this as a hopeful sign.
He doesn’t crack a grin, because he’s my therapist, and has been cast in a humorless role. Also, he’s not very funny.
I’ve been cured for a few years now, I want to say. I’ve been sitting here on sticky tape for a long time, fella, how about we head over to Mr. Ant’s for martinis?
***
I grow silent for an entire session, which is more interesting than being silent with my husband.
Even when I’m silent, he’s a ball of light. Even when he sighs as if disappointed, he lights up the office.
Memories of contentment are meteorites that zip around me so fast I miss them, I say.
Wobbling on his sofa, I feel like his 2:45 egg that has long ago hatched.
***
Too often I stare at his full lips and wonder what he looked like twenty years ago.
Again, I have flopped down in his office on a Tuesday at 2:45 with my Victorian baby smile, no words alive in my mouth.
He looks inside the doorways of my mind as if he can see me standing there, younger and leaning. He offers me his extra-soft Kleenex eyes.
***
I make a note of the profound things I’m not going to say while waiting in his art nouveau lobby. There is a built-in kind of snobbery in a doctor/patient relationship. It’s like hunting for treasure in a Cracker Jack box and never finding it.
There is puffy skin under his eyes. A muted desire, in the intensity of his gaze, for some kind of narrative “reveal”.
Today, I have questions about his own damn home life. Suspicions of a partner who loves him like a difficult dog. I think about wearing red lipstick next time. And perhaps, an art nouveau hat!
***
On a regular Tuesday at 2:45, the sun shines through the window of his expensive lobby like a blood bubble. When he walks in to retrieve me, he wears a halo around his head, like an out-of-focus ghost reflected by the centre point of pain.
Today my therapist is a silvery-haired con artist, a broken promise, a shroud made of male water ripples.
Today, what I’m seeing is light that left his orbit many years ago, and it’s as if I’m looking at both of us way back in time.
Finally, I form the words “it’s time” on my lips, roll them around inside my mouth like an egg. I’m wearing a chartreuse smile, and from some other planet, I can tell that he recognizes it. Once again his sofa is a crust of trees on a broken shore.
